Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Modern pragmatics has been defined as “philosophical ” pragmatics, not only because its main representative authors, such as John Austin (1962) and Paul Grice (1989), were philosophers of ordinary language, but also because it has used linguistic and philosophical analysis as the key method to give an explanation of the communicative features of language. If we consider language in general as an object of analysis, on the one hand, psychological language models have focused on aspects that are studied through an empirical method: phonological and syntactic modules, models of acquisition and memorization or “storage ” of lexis, biological foundations of language, etc. On the other hand, philosophical models have mainly focused on the notion of meaning and rhetorical-pragmatic aspects of verbal communication. This gap, which has deep-rooted historical origins, still persists in theories of language and in the approaches and methods of such theories, including pragmatics. As Ira Noveck and Dan Sperber stated in their ground-breaking volume (2004), the understanding of language in context has been studied by two disciplines – pragmatics and psycholinguistics – even though there has been little communication between them. However, in the last years, plenty of studies have brought classical pragmatic theories in front of the tribunal of experience to test their power of explanation and prediction. The result has been the growth of a flourishing interdiscipline, called “Experimental � We thank the referees for all the support given to the publication of this volume, whose main idea came from a research project funded by the European Science Foundation’s EURO-XPRAG Program, and the authors of the contributions, for their willingness to improve their own work and the overall volume. We are particularly grateful to Amaury Fourtet, Thomas Moraine, Jacopo Romoli, Massimo Sangoi and Silvano Zipoli Caiani for all their suggestions and help to improve the final version of the special issue.
Authors: Francesca Ervas, Elisabetta Gola
Institution: University of Cagliari
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W572335317